Who among us has not wanted to pretend like we’re friends with Nicole and Mallory? We make websites, so we figured our best shot for insta-BFF status was to offer our services for a site redesign. Like Mama always said: the best way to build friendships is through conference calls and Basecamp posts.
Time from sending that tweet to Nicole saying “Hey lady, let’s talk” was about 12 hours. Dreams really do come true, everyone.
We know you love The Toast as much as we do. Maybe even more than we do, as if that’s possible. Since we’ve taken your home on the web, moved the furniture around and redecorated it, we’d like to give you a little tour of all the things we hope you’ll love even more now. (Change is hard, we know, but please give it a chance. If you see a real problem, let us know in the comments or message us at: [email protected])
Improved get-lost-ability
The brief for this project was to make it easy for readers to waste enjoy an entire afternoon browsing The Toast. You’ll find many opportunities on the new site to look at related or popular content. Publishers call this “recirculation” so we call those modules “recircs” even though we feel gross admitting that.
Recirc modules are populated by magical elves who traipse into the garden of previously published content and pluck out the perfect stories to present to you. Each related content item will be exactly the thing you want to read next.
Hahahaha we can’t believe you fell for that. Recirc logic is straight up robot algorithms, heartless and soulless. Also brainless. We’ve done our level best to make them seem smart, but occasionally you might wonder: “Why are they showing me this?”
You’ll see six types of recircs around the site:
Most Popular and Active Now
On the homepage and article pages, we show the most popular posts from the past week. Want to jump into the fray on posts that are currently getting comments? We also show posts with the most recent activity.
More in Series
If you’ve ever wished you could just keep clicking on posts like “Two Monks Inventing Things” or “A Linguist Explains” we’re here to make that easy for you.
More by Author
If you liked one article, you might like another one by the same author. At the end of article pages and sometimes within the main feed, you’ll see other recent posts from the same person.
More in Category
On each post in the feed, you’ll notice a big, top level category like “books” or “humor.” Sometimes we’ll show you more from this category in the feed or at the end of an article.
More from Tags
You’ll find this eerily prescient or just plain weird. If we find stories that match the same combination of tags, like “sex work,” we’ll show them with the heading “You might like.”
If you’re dying to nerd out on all the details about how this works, Eileen is your people and she’s written more about taxonomy and recircs.
Lightning-fast on every device
Mobile, mobile, mobile! If there’s any platform that should whine about not getting enough attention from The Toast, it’s mobile devices. We know many of you are finding articles through Facebook and Twitter and reading the site on your phones.
The new site is built using “responsive web design” which makes a single website work on every size screen. Ethan seemed really committed to the idea of building a responsive site so we figured, sure! Your far-out idea just might work! You can see it in action by resizing your browser window on a desktop computer, or simply read the site on most any device of your choosing.
You’ll find that the site is much, much faster everywhere, but especially on mobile devices. When we looked under the hood of The Toast we found a family of mice, some moldy pizza slices, and several wadded-up old newspapers, all of which were gumming up the works. We swept away all that cruft—the mice were gently relocated to a sunny field—and as a result the site now loads much more quickly. In fact, you’ll find articles load before you even click on them! We hope this encourages you to stay on The Toast at all times and never visit any other websites.
Ethan is concerned that this promise of “web pages that load before they are clicked” is wildly inaccurate so if you’d like the real story, he’ll tell you more about responsive design and performance.
Better reflects the inner beauty of The Toast
Has your child ever cried for days because you got a haircut? Redesigning The Toast required a gentle touch. We want this to feel like the same site you’ve always known and loved, but better.
We put most of our energy into designing reusable styles and patterns for The Toast editors. We’ve made it easier to create and style posts, so they can spend less time futzing with WordPress and more time on writing and editing. Styles like block quotes, pull quotes, editor’s notes, and even interview formatting should be easier and look snazzier. (This part is pure inside baseball for the web design world, but if you’re so inclined Karen has written a rant about content + design.)
We’re excited about the gorgeous typefaces we chose, and we hope you are too because fonts are expensive. The new typography is maybe the biggest change you’ll notice, and it makes the site way easier to read. We kept the same color palette from the old site, so if turquoise and orange are your favorite colors you are in for a treat. We also kept the same logo (we know you’re attached to it) and if you look real close, you’ll see the champagne glasses from the background made it into the new site too.
Maybe the most exciting is the new set of series illustrations we’ve commissioned. Gosh, we love them. We’ve identified 55 regular series—like “Western Art History” or “If X Were Your Y“—but only have illustrations for about 10 of them today. We’d love to collect the whole set!
We asked designer Jenny and illustrator Libby if they’d answer a few questions about the new site, and they graciously agreed.
Same old janky technology as before
Toast commenters! Have you been waiting to hear what shiny modern commenting platform will replace IntenseDebate? It is IntenseDebate! Similarly, we’ve stuck with WordPress for the publishing system. We’ve done everything we can to make them work faster and better, within the limits of each system.
This file is called wordpress.gif. No reason.
As much as we might have liked to tear The Toast down to its foundations and rebuild it from scratch, doing so is both complicated and risky. We quickly and easily elected to stay on WordPress to make the process for The Toast team seamless. We slowly and regretfully chose to remain on IntenseDebate, after concluding that no other commenting system would offer much of an improvement, given the work it would require to migrate all the comments over. (Our main goal was to not lose any of the existing comments—you all are the beating heart of this website—so IntenseDebate had a leg up in these negotiations.)
IntenseDebate has been abandoned by its creators so we doubt anyone out there is sad we’re talking smack about it. WordPress partisans abound, so if you want to grab some popcorn and watch Eaton take on WordPress, he describes its benefits and drawbacks to people who know other publishing systems like Drupal.
More money, fewer problems
All these changes are designed to make The Toast more attractive to advertisers, too. A slick new website with more integrated ad placements across every screen size should help attract more refined sponsors, which means fewer bizarre redirects to the ad store. (If that keeps happening, let our publisher know—in today’s modern world of ad serving, we can’t control which ads show up, but we can try to shut bad ones down.)
Advertising on the web is a hotly debated topic right now, and we understand that some readers choose to make websites faster and advertisements less intrusive by using ad blockers (we use them too, to be quite honest). We worked hard to make the ad loading experience as good as possible, so please whitelist us on your ad blocker. The revenue from this website is almost entirely derived from advertisements, but it doesn’t have to be that way! If you like what we’re doing, please consider supporting The Toast.
— Your friends, the redesign team: Aaron Parkening, Eileen Webb, Ethan Marcotte, Jeff Eaton, Jenny Ng, Karen McGrane, Libby VanderPloeg
Hey all– beautiful redesign! However, is there an easy way to get into the archives without hitting “older posts” a million times? I like to browse old posts in general, not always by searching a series or a tag…
*heart-eyes emojis for days*
And thank you for your humane treatment of the under-the-hood mice! Mice are people too.
Guyyyys I have just turned off my ad-blocker and reloaded the page and….the ads were so unintrusive? and nothing froze or crashed? also the ads are for dresses and books, so, I don’t know if that’s based on my browsing history or the Toast target audience, but non-gross ads are a refreshing sight.
I have an ad for going to forests, this is great.
I might have just reloaded the page a whole bunch of times to see if I could see the “forests” ad and IT WORKEDDDD
SOLD
With a baby deer! (squee)
The ads are trying to sell me ebooks and local real estate. It’s like the internet knows that I am fantasizing about buying a real grownup house and painting the walls different colors and not having to go to the laundromat.
That was the first thing I tried when browsing the redesign this morning. So nice!
I have ads for BOOKS that includes a book I actually almost bought this morning and an ad for BEDSPREADS including bedspreads I looked at last week, so it’s definitely personalized to you, ie, the best and also creepiest form of advertising (I LOOOOOOVE behavioral marketing because it is relevant).
A funny part about behavioral marketing is when they advertise (as happened earlier today) things that I already bought.
I do except when I looked at bras and then I’m at work and my computer is all like, SO I HEARD YOU LIKE BOOBS. HAVE SOME MOAR BOOBS WITH YR BOOBS.
I had to set up the new Privacy option on my iPad to block ads on sites after I went to a website and it showed me an ad consisting of stock photos I’d looked at on a stock photo site the day before. I’d been looking for photos of shirtless men for the paranormal romance ebook covers that I do, and one of the photos that it showed me was one that I’d sent to a friend for laughs because the man in question was rather…umm…excited. Not something I want popping up on my iPad when I’m at work or my in-laws’ place!
Part of my ‘you are a professional romance writer now so you have to have an ongoing social media presence’ thing is that every day I post a #FunFact & photo based on, like, today is Howl at the Moon Day, so I have a shirtless Wolverine pic. Basically it’s jokes and half-nekkid dudes.
I gather them all up monthly & schedule them, but sometimes I forget to reset my safe search & privacy & clear history & all that after, and boy-howdy do my pop-up ads and random searches get super-raunchy super-fast. Usually while I’m sitting on the sofa next to my teenage son. Oops.
See, I detest behavioral marketing, because I’m a copywriter — which means I constantly get served ads for my clients. Like, OKAY, even if they let me have an employee discount (which not everyone does), I am not the target market for that $300 throw pillow AND THAT WON’T CHANGE NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU SHOW ME THE PRODUCTS I JUST DESCRIBED. Promise.
Telecommuting really futzes with work life/break time distinctions, is what I’m saying.
Pretty sure it’s browsing history; I have a ModCloth ad featuring a blazer currently lingering in my shopping cart, waiting for me to decide if I want to buy it or not.
I noticed the same thing. Ads like this, I do not mind seeing. They’re not intrusive, they don’t freeze things up, and they’re not for anything gross. And they help The Toast!
My ads are for Lunchables and coffee. I think I might be a bad mom.
Or the best mom.
This this this this this. There are three ads on this page right now, and none of them are blinking, or downloading several megabytes of auto-playing video each, or resetting my scroll position, or any of the other awful nonsense that unfortunately led to me having to sic Ghostery here full-time. If the ads stay like this, I am more than happy to leave The Toast whitelisted now, even though I am absolutely not the target market for painted high-heels ;).
Nonsense – there is no one who could not benefit from painted high-heels!
At last, being able to whitelist my favorite site. The old ads were just so crash-happy… My new ones aren’t quite as gentle as some of yours – my browsing history appears to be more tuned to tech toys and travel – but they’re lovely, and this site is lovely, and this is all just excellent.
Hoooray, I tried to whitelist The Toast before, but even with Flash blocked it crashed my browser incessantly. Now … it works! It works!
I really like the “see more in a series” and “see more by author” categories too, excellent way to ensure I never get any work done.
I am viewing this on my android phone right now and it is beautiful! Excellent work, redesign team!
Yes! I have a bad habit of trying to load a Toast post right before I get on the elevator and usually wind up staring at the “oops, no signal” screen instead. No such problems this morning – and it loads quickly even on the incredibly subpar wireless at my workplace.
Me too and it looks lovely! Excellent job redesign team.
Just whitelisted The Toast at work. I’m thrilled to do that!
Love it!
Bravo!
So psyched about the organization of the series! I can tell that’ll be my new favorite way to read massive amounts of Toast content. And I’m also really excited to turn off my ad blocker and start shoveling money your way.
Hooray for The Toast! We’re all going to love this change. I can feel it!
I remember waaay back in the old days of Jezebel before they kept redesigning every three months and then Kinja came and I was relegated to “the grays”, i.e. comment steerage. It was pretty stark to realize so abruptly that nobody upstairs gave a shit about our little commenter community. This? This could not be more friendly, clear, or in general the total opposite of the aforementioned cesspool. You actually care! I’m getting a little emotional you guys.
I LOVE YOU DUMB JERKS SO MUUUCH
WE LOVE YOU TOO!
The Gawker empire’s series of redesigns, each shittier and more broken than the last, was like a UX primer on how not to improve a website. And the way they kept insisting that it was all done for youuuuu and why don’t you appreciate our hard worrrrk was such a turnoff.
I did love how they briefly had that “top comment preview” feature on the main page and then got rid of it when it turned out that the top comment was always something like, “This title is really misleading.”
I like the sassy potential of a top comment preview. A little bit of website roulette there.
I mean, disappointing people is an inherent drawback to making your site into a fountain of clickbait, so I don’t know what they were expecting. The Toast could totally pull it off, though.
It loads so beautifully and quickly on my janky Android phone! It doesn’t leap around the page any more! Wow, it is a triumph.
It looks beautiful! My only issue is that the tittles (love that this is a real word) over the lower-case i and j aren’t very separated and are bleeding into the letters (so all the lower-case i’s look capitalized or like lower-case Ls to me). It is fixed by zooming the site in to 125%. Is anyone else noticing this?
This is my only issue too. Overall the post font is lovely and clear (I like the line spacing very much, too), but my eyes get stuck on every lower-case i, thinking it’s a typo. I’m sure I’ll get used to it but it’s not great.
I also am very happy to whitelist the site, I’ve felt so guilty for so long! I did it straight away and it looks great and there’s been no intrusiveness at all. Stellar work!
I have noticed this too and I have not yet decided whether or not it bothers me. Otherwise, the font is SO PRETTY.
Yes, I’ve also noticed that.
Not a huge fan of the font, I’m sad to say.
(The rest of it is lovely, though. <3 )
Um, yes. Were there any Old People on the redesign/font selection teams? Yes, I could crank up the magnification, but that would make me feel Even. Older.
Yes, I just screenshotted the word “linked” and zoomed in and there is just the baaaaarest lightening of the pixels to indicate the space between the dot and the stem of the lowercase i. It’s not white space but a slightly lighter gray. Weirdly, on my iPhone, I couldn’t tell what you all were talking about. It was only when I came onto the site on my laptop that I saw. That’s very distracting.
Agreed on the tittles. I’m adding my two cents half to be helpful and half to type “tittles.” Which looks an awful lot more risqué in this typeface.
To get all CSS-nerd for a moment, I think it’s an unintended side effect of the new design’s extremely specific font size definitions. The font size in the comments, for example, is 0.9375rem, while in the article it’s 1.0625rem. Those are really extremely precise declarations (most of the time, I never go past a single decimal point when defining fonts in ems or rems [for non-CSS-nerd people, you can read about ems and rems here]).
It’s likely that the specificity of the font sizes is causing bad sub-pixel font interpolation in certain browsers – or on certain operating systems with less-than-spectacular font smoothing tech (*coughWindowscough*) – especially on non-HiDPI displays, because the conjoined tittles aren’t a feature of Proxima Nova itself, and they do appear just fine when rendered on a HiDPI display like an iPhone.
hmm yes bad sub pixel font interpolation totally I completely follow you.
*nods sagely*
Figures; Chrome on Windows, and zooming fixed it. Thanks. But since that’s a browser-specific fix I hope the lovely design team will consider a fix on their end.
*makes note to self to check decimal places of font size definitions in own websites*
For about 2/3 of the text, I was vaguely assuming it was some kind of branding, like “desIgn” is definitely probably some sort of brand-specific thing having to do with “design.”
Yes this bothers me too. I’m using Chrome, on a Lenovo ideapad. I’m curious if apple users have the same issue?
I’m using Chrome on a Macbook, and I’m not having this problem. (It is taking me a little while to get used to the new font, though.)
Not having this issue on Firefox with Linux, nor on my Android phone with Chrome. I’ll go check it out on my Windows laptop
Yes it’s fine for me on firefox. And I am a bit in love with this font you guys.
Not having this problem on my iphone or on my desktop computer (iMac running Firefox)
nope, no problem on chrome on my macbook air.
I’m not seeing it. Tittles are fine for me on Firefox
Thanks for the tip on zooming to 125%! This was really bothering me but now I have no complaints. The site looks fine (and loads so quickly! yay) on my Android phone, but I thought I was seeing things on the desktop version.
I have noticed this as well.
I’m not really having that problem, but I’m seeing a different highly specific font problem in comment text: any word with a double f in it, the first f looks messed up, either too thick, as if for some reason just that one letter is bolded, or so thin that it basically disappears. I know this is nitpicky but it’s distracting and weird!
The lowercase i’s thing is happening to me too. I’m getting used to it, though.
“…(we use them too, to be honest)” That’s the loudest I’ve laughed at something online in a long, long time.
As long as the ads aren’t slowing my browser down, I have no problem with them. Also, I love this liverjournal style of comment format!
I browse my liverjournal with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
I knew there was something familiar and warm and comforting about it.
Stellar work!
Intensedebate obviously isn’t perfect, but for me it is better than any others I’ve had to use at other sites.
Agreed. Disqus is semi-okay, but Kinja can go right back to the pits of hell from whence it originated.
I’m oddly partial to Disqus, just because I can see my occasional comments on a tiara/royalty blog, sex toy blog, and snarky fashion blog all in the same place.
I really like that Intense Debate doesn’t necessarily follow me everywhere – so I can comment on craft blogs AND on the toast without having to log in and out all the time. I’m ok with those profiles being linked by a person paying attention but I don’t want to announce it to the world, you know?
Also the redesign seems to be making the ID comment nesting seem clearer and more sensible to me, so most of my issue with it is resolved. The only thing is that I’m still not sure how the ‘subscribe to’ works. If I subscribe to ‘replies’ is that replies only to my comment? What if I want to subscribe to the whole subthread, but not the comments on the post as a whole? No other OOTB commenting system seems to manage this well, though.
I am so relieved to hear how treasured the comments were. I am so relieved that my old comments on the Hairpin aren’t there anymore, but I feel so lonely deep down in my soul when I think about how all of that is just gone. Our history! Wiped out! As if it doesn’t matter. I was going to try to make a joke about it but I can’t, it hurts too much.
Yeah, in a world of just terrible commenting systems, IntenseDebate is only sort of terrible.*
*Someone with real technology skills, can you explain why commenting systems suck so much? There has to be a reason other than “because they do.”
@eaton (a person with the most real technology skills of all time) got into this a little bit more on the podcast: http://responsivewebdesign.com/podcast/the-toast….
Great, thanks!
*kool-aid-man crash*
HI EVERYBODY!
I’m Eaton, the guy who did the wordpress work for the redesign. I’m an architect/digital strategy guy for Lullabot, and we build lots of media and social sites. Which is to say I have SO MANY FEELINGS about community features and commenting in particular on the modern web, and you just walked right into them like a misplaced garden rake.
In a nutshell, commenting is one of those things that can make a site grind to a halt if it’s not done efficiently. Most web servers keep things snappy and fast by saving a copy of each page once they build it, and serving up that copy rather than building it from scratch each time someone visits. When the stuff on that page *changes*, though, they have to do the work of rebuilding it all over again. Guess what changes the contents of a page? Posting comments. Yay!
So.
Lots of web sites these days solve the problem by farming out commenting to another service, like IntenseDebate or Disqus or LiveFyre. These sites (like The Toast) build up a regular old page with a *placeholder* for where the comments should go, and let the commenting service’s JavaScript code magically pop comments into that placeholder spot. The web site only has to manage the slow-changing content like articles and stuff, the third-party service handles complicated bits like logging people in and catching spam and keeping things moving smoothly during fast conversations. (Even Kinja, which has been mentioned before, is basically a private version of that kind of service built just for the Gawker family of sites.)
But.
The problem is that those third-party services that handle comments are sometimes a little janky. The hard work of managing and building and slinging around all those comments still has to be done, and they often pay the bills by jamming their own ads into the comment stream or charging lots of money or alternatively being slow and janky.
IntenseDebate, although it has a lot of nice features, firmly occupies the “slow and janky” quadrant. It’s not well supported by the company that made it, since they’ve moved on to other things, but it also doesn’t slather NASCAR style ads on top of everything, either. It’s a trade off.
There is totally a need for better, cleaner, easier-to-integrate, less-buggy commenting systems. The problem is that they’re very complicated to build in a way that works on very busy sites, and most decent solutions are massively expensive or plastered with ads.
What’re your thoughts on Discourse? I haven’t used it, but I’ve heard both good and bad about it.
Thank you for being so intentional about the commenting system, it honestly means a lot to me…and others I suspect.
I just have one wee request (which I already mentioned on the round-up post but want to reiterate here, in its proper place): Could the commentor score/ranking/whatever-ID-calls-it be hidden again, rather than displayed next to each comment? I think one of the things that makes The Toast’s comments section so supportive and amazing and unique (in addition to strong moderation) is the equal display treatment of the commenters. Since it’s not immediately apparent if you’ve been commenting here since day 1 versus yesterday, there’s no concern that your feedback would be dismissed as a newbie. But if that ranking number is right there, I’m just worried that hierarchy will start to influence how commenters interact, even subconsciously.
That’s exactly the sort of salient, intelligent post I would expect from a 117.
Forget subconsciously, I’m half-considering actually making an account now because I want to see what number I would get.
Thank you, as well! This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read.
It looks great! I get that you’re trying to get lots of recircs, but I am finding the sidebar on the homepage distractingly huge.
Beautiful! Wonderful! Readable on my phone!
Congrats, team.
“The funny tags (like truckin’ and the continuation thereof) are a vital and hilarious part of The Toast experience, but the little information architect in our hearts wept whenever a user clicked through to the archive page for one of the 6,152 tags that only had a single post in them. On the new site, those “tags” are still presented on the front-end, but on the back-end they’re just a plain text field. (The fake tags link out to a Google Search, which we think is hilarious. We’re fun at parties.) We kept the funny and the functional, but gave them each their own field so they could be used differently. Deep breaths, taxonomists. It’s all going to be OK.”
THIS IS BRILLIANT and was my main wonder on how you were going to handle it. Standing ovation forever.
@webmeadow takes a bow
Yes, I am reading the taxonomy section right now and I am in awe. So great.
AGREED re: the brilliance here. I’m super impressed.
I feel like the joke relies in part on my belief that they are or could someday be tags, though. Someone tell me – it does not have to be true – that if “quoting pretty liberally from the rule of st. romuald” gets used AGAIN in the future as a tag, it automagically converts from text to Real Tag. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, but less scary.
The new site is Shiny and Chrome!
Which is particularly exciting because Chrome seemed to hate The Toast before.
we live, we die. WE LIVE AGAIN!
A++ redesign <3
*makes the V8 sign*
It loaded quickly and cleanly on my garbage work browser. I love it already!
I’m having some trouble with staying logged in, I think? I try to post and it tells me my session has expired, but it still says I’m logged in via WordPress.
That happens to me at work a lot (since before the redesign went live), although not at home. I find closing the tab and reopening it makes it see me as logged in again.
Thank you! Whenever I haveproblems I just try refreshing the page (which is no big deal now that it loads so quickly) and the comment posts without problems.
This is lovely, but it’s going to take so long to get used to! I browsed over the weekend and read a few posts and found that the lack of definition to the columns made it difficult to focus on the text – likewise in the comments (I described this on the Link Round-up as “floating in a sea of floatiness”).
I admit that I don’t generally like columns of text on a white background with white to all the sides (eta: it’s not so bad when the text fills the entire window), and can never read McSweeney’s website for very long because of it. Also, the Buzzfeed Longreads which are all floaty, too, I hate those and have to make my window tiny to be comfortable reading them. Maybe one day someone can come up with a Stylish script to set the not-text bg to grey again?
I agree with this. I love The Toast enough to tolerate it even though I hate it elsewhere. It seems like it’s becoming the standard for so many sites that I should get used to it but I’m old school and browse on my computer so I miss the days when things were less floaty.
I’m really glad yu came back to reply to me! I felt bad for my comment being kind of negative because I Don’t Like Change and also I Really Hate Modern Blog/News Design (not all of it, just the way so many sites force 20pt font on me instead of letting me use my browser settings to make it comfortable viewing?? and also giant whitespace on either side of the text with no definition for the central column), when I really do like a lot of the new changes!
It sounds like we’re going to get a faint grey background behind the comments again, which will help a lot. It’ll still be the spiff new look, but a little less floaty and bright on the eyes. 😀
I’m worried about sounding negative too. There are lots of changes that I love and it’s not all bad.
Text size and white space are things that bother me too, especially since I never use my phone to read most sites so how great it looks on a mobile browser is lost on me.
Can you see the comments background now? Did you mean we’ll get a different one? Everything seems to be seeing slightly different things so I don’t know if it’s the same one I’m seeing.
I agree, and also don’t want to be negative. It does look nice and we are happy it loads well but, but…
it looks like all the other “cool” sites, e.g. Medium. (I’m sure we’ll adjust)
I can disable my custom style that overrode the old font! Woo! And now I can read on my tiny phone, which was flat-out impossible before! Well done, very exciting.
(It is definitely confusing that the name/email/website fields still display when I’m logged into IntenseDebate, though.)
Yeah that bothers me a little too (the name/email/website thing) … hopefully it’s on the list of someday-updates!
Comments to the update post say that it’s in the next code push, yay!
Guys I whitelisted The Toast and I have ads for REGULAR type ads and my browser hasn’t crashed once what a day what a time to be alive!
Don’t you mean “How lucky we are to be alive right now”? 😉
History is happenin’ and we just happen to be on the greatest site in the world
…..THE GREATEST SITE IN THE WORLD
I love the redesign–the old version always caused browser crashes and killer lag for me. This is great!
This intro to the redesign is a great idea. Plus you warned everybody it was coming, which is not something every website does, which sometimes leads to… unpleasantness.
Generally it looks stellar.
Lots of whitespace, which web designers seem to love.
Edit: Below the “Subscribe to Replies” box there are two lines that say “Enter text right here!” which seems out of place
Edit 2: Gone now. The webdesign elves must have ate them.
holy cow: an ad story
The first banner ad was for dresses, which I Xed and then clicked on the not relevant button because frankly I am more of a pencil skirt guy and the next time I refreshed the ad was for CSA Standards and I want to buy the new Canadian Electrical Code SO I CLICKED ON AN AD ON THE INTERNET this website is a screaming success
Hooray! This is so exciting and I could not have been more happy to finally (FINALLY!!!!) whitelist the site. *does a little dance of joy*
Everything looks beautiful and this is just great.
One comment/question: the “thumbs ups” don’t change character or color after you have clicked, so you might not know you’ve already thumbsed-upped a comment. Is this just me or is this intentional?
There was a reply in the link roundup that this is being worked on to make it clearer when you’ve done it.
Thanks!
Ooh. I did not notice this during beta-testing. Now I want to know too!
Now when you click a thumb, it turns orange! Woo!
This isn’t working for me (yet?), but cool that it’s gonna be a thing!
I noticed the difference on mobile literally as I clicked the link. Looking forward to exploring the rest of the good stuff! Great job, all!
Posts seem to be moving around? The Madeline Kahn Monday one was at the top a minute ago, now it’s this one and the newest post is below it.
The hamster that powers the site is new on the job, give him a little time to get up to speed.
(We had a little bug in the post logic that handles sponsored posts that was making that happen, we will fix ASAP.)
Lovely stuff thankyou! I’d hate to pressure the hamster.
nitpick, but is there a reason why all lowercase i’s seem to look like lowercase l’s/uppercase I’s..? it’s distracting to me………
Me too! I wondered about that. It seems like such a small thing, but it makes things a little harder to read…
I love the redesign! I normally avoid reading the toast on my phone because it can be so frustrating, but so far, I prefer my phone-version over my laptop. Thank you, you wonderful people, you!
it looks gorgeous! I can’t wait to whitelist The Toast on my (slow as hell) home computer 😀
one tiny quibble: on the individual series pages, there’s an awful lot of white space below the series title (screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/FcT800v.png). Not sure if it’s just my computer/browser (Mac running Firefox) or if this was done on purpose, though.
ETA: one more thing, which might be an IntenseDebate problem: I’m not seeing any space between “Edit” and “Delete” under my comments (so it looks like “EditDelete”). Same thing is happening with “Cancel” and “Save” as I’m editing this comment right now.
Mallory is currently writing lil series page descriptions to go in there, so the white space is a placeholder for her BRILLIANCE!
Ah hah! Well that makes sense then 😀
Just wanted to chime in that I whitelisted the Toast after the redesign, and it’s going swimmingly! Thank you, design team and Toasties in Chief <3
Yay! Congratulations! I don’t care how it works, but it works! Very excited.
I love the fonts!!! As a small-ish font nerd they make me so happy! Squee!!! I am not getting the problem with the tittles that someone else mentioned…
Yay nonintrusive relevant ads! The right panel does seem distractingly big on the home screen when I view it full size on my browser, but I love how it resizes, and maybe I will get used to it at full size…
SO pretty! Huzzah, all of you! Huzzah!
I just scrolled down to the bottom of the main page and saw all the little illustrations. I LOVE THEM! AAAH!
You guys, I whitelisted the site, and it hardly slows down my browser at all now! It still slows it down a little, but not so much that I can’t do anything. MAGIC.
One tiny quibble: links from the main page don’t seem to automatically open in a new tab anymore, which requires me to actually make an effort to get them to open in a new tab.
I just hold ctrl when I click to open in a new tab, which is habit anyway, but opening in a new tab is always great
I just need to start remembering to right-click on links, and all will be gravy.
And all manner of thing will be gravy.
Really nice work. And yeah, doing great work for someone awesome is probably the best way to become friendish with them and insinuate your way into their hearts and get access to pet their adorable puppies… Anyone know if Nicole’s friend Carrie needs any database help?
I’m going to need some time to get used to this, but I love the fact that the search bar is now located on top of the site (so easy to find!). I also really like reading on this new background. And what, hyphenation in the comments is now automatic? Awesome!
But I don’t really like the author recommendations on the main feed – not because I don’t want to read other things by the same person, but because it distracts me from scrolling through the new articles.
Edit: After reading more, I realized that while I do like the new font, the background is blinding me – it’s just too white :/
That’s a real bummer about the white blinding you 🙁 I have realised it probably would for me on a regular screen, too. I have the contrast and brightness turned waaaaaaaay down on my work screens because I am light sensitive and the fluorescent lights in my office are way over the top so I struggle at the best of times. Is turning the contrast down an option for you? It will tone down bright whites right away.
I have to say I that while I would feel ok about more background in the white part, I am super grateful that the background on the actual comments is so light – much darker than it used to be and I get afterimages and it’s all terrible. This soft grey is PERFECT for me.
I have the contrast turned way down on my laptop, but it’s still SUPER bright white to me. I don’t see ANY grey behind the comments at all, currently. It’s all the same white. I’ve even tilted my screen to exaggerate the shifts in color. 🙁
Basically if you’re getting a grey background and I’m not, I’m a little bit jealous.
woo! it’s gorgeous!!
I am going to read all of your posts about this process because it is techially related to my job and that means reading it at work is a-ok. However it does feel slightly like being made to eat your vegetables, but at least they’re nicely prepared vegetables.
I’m also going to agree that the comment are a bit too floaty, a small bit of background on the comment column would make a huge difference for people like me who have eyes that don’t like to focus on large white spaces. (I’m having a really bad eye day that is making work very hard, and unfortunately reading Toast comments is also causing pain.)
Apart from eye-issues though, wow did you guys knock this out fast! I wish I could get a website re-designed, built and launched in less than 6 months these days.
Cleaner, faster, more functional. This redesign is a thing of beauty. I just read through all of the redesign docs and my hat’s off to you all for the cleverness of your approach and your clarity in explaining it.
Also, I whitelisted the site and this very page now has one ad for dresses and another for power tools, which led to much cackling over here. I don’t think I have ever been so amused by an algorithm. Yay, confused ad-serving elves!
Additional props for ever-scrolling comments, btw. That’s a nice touch.
I got Manitoba Tourism and then mountaineering equipment. I did recently google related subjects but that still gave me a giggle
The design is lovely! But! Are the timestamps on posts off for anyone but me? The front page tells me that this morning’s link roundup was posted “8 hours ago”, which would put it at something like 4 AM EDT and 1 AM PDT. Is a timezone conversion getting lost somewhere?
Timezones Are Hard, and boy howdy are we fixing that right now.
Thank you!
This feels like a lot of other website redesigns lately, where “responsive” actually seems to mean “designed solely for mobile”, so that even on a desktop screen you’re just looking at a single column of text. Maybe that’s just what we’re doing now, but it feels like a waste of space and makes it hard to focus (I second keristars’s dislike of the “floaty sea of floatiness”). Having the popular/active items in sidebars on the article pages as well as on the home page would help–shunting them down to the bottom of the comments basically guarantees I’m never going to see them.
Seconded! Would be great to have the recommendations in a sidebar on large screens and interspersed with the article text on smaller ones.
‘responsive’ is completely ‘designed solely for phones’, thankfully this layout at least includes break points to allow for the little use of stuff on the side bars it does have and doesn’t autoscale every single image down to some unreadable pixelated mess (screw you Tumblr, and screw everyone who runs an art blog on you!)
I have yet to acquire a smartphone (I will one day, but they are expensive and require decision-making), and the ongoing trend for stuff that works on mobile devices can make sites a lot less pleasant to use on laptops/desktops. I know smartphones are pretty ubiquitous now, but I wish there wasn’t quite so much white space when using the Toast on a laptop.
I agree; on an actual computer it’s so much white space, aack. And in terms of navigation I actually feel LESS inclined to keep reading other things without the usual and familiar setup of other surrounds, rather than just floaty blurbs that my eyes just skate right over in the midst of throbbing whitespace angst. 🙁
Can there be a middle ground between… whatever ad stuff was wrong with the old site, I gather… and this mobile ubiquity? It’s kinda painful.
Wow, that is an epic redesign team! And it looks so wonderful! I’m on a tablet right now and it’s such a pleasant experience. Good call on IntenseDebate, it really makes commenter interaction easier and fun.
i whitelisted the toast and my browser did not melt down and run all over my desktop. woot!
After reading about the new tagging/back end systems, I have a Very Serious Question for the Redesign Team;
How much drawing on walls and shouting was involved in this process?
My team don’t do anything this complicated, but it seems every website requires at least 4 hours of me (Producer) and the head of back end yelling* at each other and drawing ever more elaborate flow charts and page designs on the walls**, while our front end devs sit in silence and eventually our Technical Director has to get involved and takes the sharpie off us. He then draws on the wall and we all shout for at least another hour. Eventually we all realize that we were agreeing all along and get back to work. Then we forget the entire conversation and have another yelling match a week later, but this time we bring in the designer too.
*Its good-natured yelling, mostly.
**We have special walls that we’re allowed to draw on, no one is vandalizing company property. Yet.
Honestly, this was one of the smoothest projects we’ve ever worked on. We all really, really like each other so that goes a long way. None of us are in the same city so we did everything via Slack. There was, well, zero yelling and also zero whiteboarding. (If we were in the same room I bet there would have been some drawing but still no yelling.)
The holy grail of a web project!
This looks great. Clean and sleek for my eyeballs and my computer both. My biggest quibble is the lack of an indication when I’ve liked a comment—the little thumbs-up doesn’t go grey or change color or anything, so it’s hard to know what I’ve already liked and where I still need to spread the love. Otherwise, A++ job!
Mine goes orange when I like something. If you’re using an ad blocker that might prevent the script from running properly?
They just changed it. Like right now. Thanks redesign peeps!
Feeling so coddled right now. And proud, as always, to be part of a community where users’ opinions matters. Thanks for listening, development team!
So coddled! Part of me wants to keep suggesting things. Like hey development team, I would like reading the-toast a lot more if the new adele album was softly playing in the background and I had a mug of hot apple cider.
I’m so impressed! I’ve been here for like 45 minutes, liking away, seeing my thumbs up turn orange, and confusedly reading several comments from the morning about how there’s nothing to indicate a comment has been liked. Great job, team!
Would it be possible to make comments that we’ve already thumbsed up change color, or to disable the irritating little box that says we’ve already voted for that comment?
I think they said in the Link Roundup that they’re working on that now.
Whitelisted EVERYWHERE. Great job, redesign team! I love your forthright explanations.
No complaints yet — change is inherently weird, so I’m going to give it a week or so to see how I adjust and if anything remains intrusive.
P.S. OMG, I love the improvements to IntenseDebate just for 1) not putting the flag button right by the like button and 2) FINALLY LETTING ME EXPAND THE COMMENT FIELD AS I COMPOSE MY COMMENT. That is just huge.
However, as I edit this, I see “CancelSave” right next to each other like that, which is not ideal.
Why is the most recently posted content showing up in the #2 spot when I hit the home page, and the the second most recently posted content at the top of the list? That’s weird.
I’m so pleased. I can now read The Toast on my phone and on my computer without multiple crashes and freezes. Thank you!
One tiny little small request: if they’re going to be showing up in recommendation lists sans context, titles like “Link Roundup” could maybe use a date or something.
Just going forward. Not to be pushy.
IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL ON MY PHONE NOW
*infinite heart-eyes*
1) It’s gorgeous, I love it, congrats! 2) I have had a few cartoons published on The Toast, and they were all pretty early in the site’s lifetime. I searched my name to make sure I could still find them. Only two posts came up – Mindy Hung’s short stories, for which I provided illustrations. The cartoon posts that actually have my name as Author do not show up. Not sure what causes that but thought you should know!
Here is a weird thing.
If you Search The Toast for Haley Crain, only Mindy Hung’s short stories appear, as mentioned above. If you click into one of the stories (I chose the one with the colors, http://the-toast.net/2013/08/28/three-short-stori… and scroll to the bottom, there is an “Illustrator” blurb about Haley where her name is hyperlink, and her name is also a tag in the tag section. If you click her name in the Illustrator blurb, you get 4 returns for Haley’s cartoons. If you click her name in the tags, you get her short story illustrations AND her cartoons.
Also, if you apply these three different searching “methods” to a more prolific writer such as Jaya Saxena, you get a hot mess.
You guys are gods and goddesses among humans. LOVE LOVE LOVE the redesign and these illustrations are EVERYTHING.
I find the “recircs” on the main page in the main column a bit jarring, to be honest. I usually browse the toast once per day, so I open the main page and scroll down, opening whichever new articles look interesting in new tabs. I stop when I get to old content.
The “more by this author” and “you might like” inserted into the main list of articles is a) annoying, because it breaks the flow, and b) nonsensical, because I haven’t even clicked on the articles yet–how should I know if I want to read more by this author or more like this article, when I haven’t read the article it grabs the data from yet? My brain registers reaching a recirc module as “end” so it is very confusing when the recirc does not mean “end.”
Maybe it is intended to break the flow, as it appears that there are more articles per page now?
The redesign is very pretty and I find all the fonts legible and aesthetically pleasing, it’s just the recircs-in-the-content bit which I can’t deal with.
I found this so jarring to begin with. I also read the toast daily and basically want to know where the day’s posts start.
That said, it’s day 2 of me experiencing the redesign and I’m finding my brain is already learning what is content and what is inserts so I’m finding it easier to ignore them and know that it doesn’t mean ‘end’.
I have noticed a lot of websites now have inserts that read as ‘end’ to me, and annoyingly they often seem to be inserted in sort of a narrative pause in the article. So that’s irritating and maybe I’m an old person now. ‘How it was before Was FINE!’ I shout as I shake my fist at the sky. (it was tho)
That was very confusing to me at first too. I don’t mind recircs (I’m the type of person who clicks on them all afternoon long if given the chance) but only when they’re *inside* the articles. It has the bonus of letting me decide if I liked the article and want to read more like it.
It is lovely and fast! Fast!!!! And also Lovely!!!
I’m reduced to repeating myself with increasing numbers of exclamation points, so I’ll stop there.
Nothing is crashing! So much time lost to reloading my work browser after it freezes and crashes–now nothing but an unpleasant memory. Well done.
I’m usually on my phone on the toast, and the redesign is just so beautiful to use. No more weird resizing! The pictures aren’t cut off! I haven’t accidentally been sent to the play store even once! Thank you for this thoughtful, hard work.
This looks so so so good. My desktop computer at work is a PC with out-of-date web browsers and a zillion annoying security programs, so I wasn’t ever able to browse the site or comment before. Now it’s a whole new world! The ads are so much less intrusive! Thank you beautiful designer witches!
I don’t want to complain but just give some feedback on one point. In the new main font, the tittle on the top of the lowercase “i” appears to run together with the rest of the letter so that it reads to the eye as a lowercase “l.” It’s sort of like reading old documents with the elongated “s” that looks like an “f” (resulting in the Constitution looking like it keeps saying “Congreff”).
Maybe others don’t have a similar problem.
Yay orange thumbs-up to show where I’ve already clicked!
Sorry about that! Should be suuuuuper obvious now.
Gonna bring back the light gray background for comments too, hold tight.
I’m so excited about the redesign. There are days when I don’t read The Toast b/c I can’t deal with my whole browser freezing. I suspect this won’t be true anymore!
Gorgeous! It doesn’t crash my browser and it looks beautiful. Congrats!!
I like this so much, really! It looks lovely. I had whitelisted the main page but now I have whitelisted the entire domain. I like the suggestions re: background color for comments and color change for comments that have been liked, but nothing makes me want to scream and run away.
Shiny new toast! Everything is so big and clean now, it’s amazing.
My comment is about the main page: because the author information appears above the title of the post, it makes it a little confusing to figure out which post is written by which author. I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time! But that’s the thing I noticed (immediately after oooh shiny :).
YAY redesign team! I love the way the site looks and I love how responsive y’all are being to all of our little comments about the details of the new layout. The open discussion and the way that the writers and commenters value each other are an important part of why The Toast is the best place on the internet.
Amazingly this hasn’t crashed my veryterriblyancient ipad, which has not updated its OS for many a day. I love it!!
Just because I haven’t seen anyone else mention this yet–Sometimes when I load the page, I get the old IntenseDebate look, but slightly skewed (“Reply” button is off-kilter, different font from the old look). This doesn’t seem to be tied to any particular article–it’s shown up on multiple articles, then gone away when I’ve returned to the page later. I’m using IE, not sure what version, on a Windows computer.
i love the redesign but i almost love how lovely everyone is being about the ads more!?!?!
“If you’ve ever wished you could just keep clicking on posts like “Two Monks Inventing Things”….
THIS IS ALL I’VE EVER WISHED.
man every time someone talks about what a dumpster fire WordPress is and how hard it is to set up custom functions I think back to my last big Drupal project, in which it took an entire team of fulltime Drupal developers two months to make their slightly nonstandard, unambitious new content types able to post and display images
what I’m sayin here is the site is lovely and runs great now and if you think it’s not great you have no idea how many bullets you’ve dodged
I manage several heavily customized WordPress sites and a big Drupal site at work and they are both awful in their own magical, special ways.
I didn’t read this article at all but I noticed that things were different so I thought I’d say something so that I can hear the sound of my voice on the internet. Also the first time I saw the change I thought I had gotten the mobile site by accident.
This looks gorgeous! I still can’t actually log in and comment from my real account (a WordPress one) on my work laptop, but I’ll just keep the interns employed by continuing to submit as a guest. Kudos, Beautification Team!
one of my work monitors is oriented in portrait so the comments used to get cut off, but now they don’t anymore! yay!
the lowercase i is different!!!
I whitelisted the site but I am still not seeing any ads. I am not sure why?
They’re at the top or on the sidebar but they’re not intrusive so they’re hard to miss. Is your Flash player updated? You need that for the ads.
Not necessarily–I have Flash disabled (as everyone should, because it’s terrible and unsafe) and I still get some ads.
You’re right! I was getting blacked out boxes (I have Flash disabled too) but today I’m seeing ads.
This is lovely! And the writeup was just excellent — we’re redesigning our website and work and it was a great, readable explanation of all the parts of the process and why they’re important, which my boss found really helpful. Unfortunately our content model is just a liiiitle more complex but I’m definitely bookmarking this for clients and future bosses.
I’m curious if you guys are just using the core Users feature for multiple author posts — i.e. are MATT & JAYA a single author along with MATT and JAYA? I was really hoping someone had finally made an end-all be-all plugin that puts this problem to rest for good.
Also, for some reason Proxima Nova at 17px is rendering with the dot in the lowercase i touching the body for me (in Chrome at widescreen desktop res). Looks fine if I force it to 16 or 18 though.
We do support multi-author posts now! We also support user accounts for illustrators too! We even support multi-illustrator posts! The miracle of database fields.
That doesn’t fix any old posts, however, so Matt & Jaya are still a combined author entity on past posts. But this will help a lot for future posts. We’re also fixing some problems with author search, as in, right now it doesn’t exist.
New co-authored posts will not show up in the recircs, because it turned out to be way too much of a performance hit to check if an author was a co-author on anything. So we would probably recommend keeping “Nicole and Mallory” and “Matt and Jaya” as their own unique author entities.
That is probably way more than you wanted to know on the subject of multi-author handling.
are all replies to others’ comments no longer preceded by down&over arrow? i’m having a hard time figuring out where one conversation string ends and the next one begins or who exactly is replying to what/who.
The Toastatariat has actively made me excited about seeing ads on this site. Like, I feel a little left out that II don’t see the ads and now I am going to turn off Adblocker so I can see them tooooooo.
Me too. All the ads I’m getting are a bit gross but they’re handled so well by the new layout and everyone is so happy to be supporting The Toast that I had to whitelist the site.
Loving the new site! Need to explore a bit more but on first impression its gorgeous. I’m currently project managing a redesign/rebuild of a content site at my work and i love the way everything here has been perfectly considered with the readers experience as the number one priority. With my bosses i can only dream of such a luxury 😛
Love it. Love the toast, love the redesign
Thanks for sharing how you did this! The taxonomy stuff is particularly fascinating.
You’ve been so responsive that the main things I had problems with have already been fixed (yay), but I do have one question. There used to be a list of all of the categories on the main page, so you could easily browse by category to find stuff to read. This seems to have vanished; has it been moved elsewhere, or is it completely gone?
Updates! The redesign team has been keeping an eye on all your comments and bugs, and I thought I’d let you know what’s going on over here.
* We are going to increase the font size and that should solve the problem of the superscript dots (aka tittles) on lowercase I and J running into the letterform. (Wikipedia says “The word tittle is rarely used” but I beg to differ reading this comment thread.)
* We had no idea how soothing you found the gray background on the comment threads. We want the comments to be restful so that should be back momentarily. (The thumbs up color is already fixed.)
* Same deal with the imaginary internet bucks or whatever those comment point counts are, they are gone. This isn’t Reddit.
* There’s a little bug in the donate forms that causes the two forms to talk to each other. Thanks everyone who motored on through that and donated anyway! It seems to be a known problem in the “Give” module but we’ll poke at it.
* We’re going to get out our post-its and whiteboard markers and figure out a way to provide top level navigation access to all the categories and all the series.
* Maybe there are few other little bugs running around; let us know if you see any other weirdness. We appreciate your help with that and with your patience during the transition.
AND thanks so much for all your very kind and positive comments. We’ve been pasting them into our team Slack all day. Makes us happy that you’re happy.
I assume this is an Intense Debate issue and not a site specific issue but maybe someone knows the answer? Is there a way to ‘expand all’ comments? The most annoying part of this is when I get an email saying that someone’s responded to my comment, but it just takes me to the last page of comments and I can’t remember which comment subthread I responded in, or what page it was on or….. it’s not the end of the world but it’s v frustrating.
The soft grey is lovely. Thank you for being so responsive and also for not making it too dark (which also hurts my eyes). I am just so thrilled by how responsive and friendly you all are! And also by the redesign, which is a DELIGHT.
Wait I also have another maybe-ID issue. The comments now break words instead of line wrapping. So, in your comment, you have ‘top level navigation ac-cess’. It makes it a bit confusing and hard to read. Is this a thing you can fix?
Thank you for listening to the users! I’ve been a lurker for the most part but I love The Toast and everyone associated with it because of things like this.
Y’all are great! Thank you for turning off the commenting scoring system!
Thank you for being so responsive!
This is great, thanks.
I’m still seeing IntenseDebate ask me to enter name-email-website directly below the comment box, by the way, _before_ the “Posting as (logout)” line, which is kind of confusing. (Chrome, Windows.)
This has already been fixed and is waiting for our next code push.
Cool, thanks so much!
I am going to mention this again just because I don’t see it addressed directly in your updates. (So many updates, so quickly! Like no site/code redesign process I have EVAR experienced! I think I love you!)
If you Search The Toast for Haley Crain, only Mindy Hung’s short stories appear, as mentioned above. If you click into one of the stories (I chose the one with the colors, http://the-toast.net/2013/08/28/three-short-stori…. and scroll to the bottom, there is an “Illustrator” blurb about Haley where her name is hyperlink, and her name is also a tag in the tag section. If you click her name in the Illustrator blurb, you get 4 returns for Haley’s cartoons. If you click her name in the tags, you get her short story illustrations AND her cartoons. Also, if you apply these three different searching “methods” to a more prolific writer such as Jaya Saxena, you get a hot mess.
A couple of things here. We are right now working on modifying the default search query, apparently WP does not search author names by default, because ¯\_( wordpress )_/¯ So right now, search isn’t matching Haley’s name as an author, it is only matching on her name appearing in the body of Mindy’s post.
For future posts, we have set up proper structuring for multi-author posts, and also proper user accounts for illustrators. Unfortunately “person” structures on the old posts are a hot mess and we have little way to remediate that in an automated way. So for old posts:
* Illustrators are not handled as user accounts, they are just noted in the text (as in Haley’s example above)
* Multi-authors are their own entity, often without a user account (see: Matt and Jaya)
* Authors are often included in the tags, which results in some inaccuracy in search
We don’t have any good way to fix the problems on the old posts.
Thanks!
Yay! I came here to ask if there was anyway to have easier access to categories and series and I see that it’s already being considered. <3
Also, I’m having issues with the search basically not working at all. Like I searched “redesign” and it told me there were no results. I had to do a Google search to find this post. Which I’m not opposed to doing, but found odd. so just another comment to add to some of the search weirdness that is happening.
Thanks for catching the search problem. We are trying to make it search author names; apparently it has given up and stopped searching for anything. We’ll fix!
Also the fix for all category and series pages should be in soon.
the mobile site is awesome! i do most of my toast reading on mobile and was being very patient with the old site, but the new one loads very quickly on my phone and i love it.
i also really love the details given about the redesign, it’s unusual to see so much depth on why various decisions were made and it’s much appreciated!
I’m glad the background on comments came back! It’s easier on the eyes.
Okay, I do have one nitpicky gripe, after looking at the new site all day, which is that the graphic for whichever story is at the topic at any given time is huge when I am reading on my laptop. Huge enough that I have to scroll down to see the headline. I am down with having that first graphic stand out a bit more but scaled down a bit would be nice.
I can see it not being a problem at all when I am on my phone or iPad but i’m less crazy about the look when I am on my actual computer.
Honestly the only thing I feel remotely moved to complain about, it all does look so pretty.
Thank. You.
Oh my stars and garters! It’s fantastic! And what incredible responsiveness to our suggestions! I’m so happy to see the grey backgrounds and the orange thumbs.
For anyone who can’t see that stuff, as I couldn’t a moment ago, clearing your browser cache should do it.
I DON’T LIKE CHANGE.
That being said, even my neuroses look better on this site. God the comment text box font is smooth. Well done.
Hello! Everything is lovely, especially the part about no more crashing and autoplay video nonsense.
Except, and this is very minor, the deleted comment of the day is just too small. (In Firefox, on my big monitor at work.) I have to lean in real close to read it, very bad for the posture.
You are an angel of light and beauty and this mobile user loves you.
Gorgeous, love it!
I’ve always been a loyal sort of Internet user, the kind who sticks around through change after change until a website is literally unusable. (LJ, Jezebel, Tumblr, etc…)
I have NEVER seen a redesign go so smoothly or effectively as this one and I have especially never seen the users be so universally approving of the changes. I don’t think users of any site on the internet ever have been PLEASED to see ads load on a website. You must be magical beings. Thank you for your skillz and transparency and AMAZINGLY FAST taking into consideration of our comments! I hope you get all of the work you want and only ever have to direct people to this comments section in lieu of a resume for the rest of your careers. I wish tumblr would hire you. (But you shouldn’t have to deal with their crap. You are clearly better than that.)
Aww, thank you so much! I have a special file where I am keeping all the nice things that people say and your comment just went right into it. (I also have a special file where I keep mean things people say about me, it is called the trash.)
Love the revamp. One complaint:
I don’t know if it’s the comment stuff provider or Google Chrome or whatever, but when I view this on Google Chrome all of the lower-case i’s are basically indistinguishable from ls. It is really ridiculously hard to read and even type. It’s not a problem in the articles themselves, just the comment font. Oh, and having now typed a j, it’s the same with js. So, yeah. Anyone else seeing this?
Thank you! Whenever I haveproblems I just try refreshing the page (which is no big deal now that it loads so quickly) and the comment posts without problems.
Yay! I came here to ask if there was anyway to have easier access to categories and series and I see that it's already being considered. <3
Also, I'm having issues with the search basically not working at all. Like I searched "redesign" and it told me there were no results. I had to do a Google search to find this post. Which I'm not opposed to doing, but found odd. so just another comment to add to some of the search weirdness that is happening.
Thanks for catching the search problem. We are trying to make it search author names; apparently it has given up and stopped searching for anything. We’ll fix!Also the fix for all category and series pages should be in soon.
Aww, thank you so much! I have a special file where I am keeping all the nice things that people say and your comment just went right into it. (I also have a special file where I keep mean things people say about me, it is called the trash.)
Gorgeous redesign! And thank you for re-homing the mice. =)
I don’t know if you’re still monitoring this post. I hope so. I’m having an accessibility issue. The teaser pics on the main page are way too large relative to font size and eat up too much screen space. But they’re coded a single element so I can’t use scripts or addons to resize them independently. This isn’t an issue on article pages, where I can shrink the pics and up the text just fine. But I spent over an hour today trying to find a workaround and just wound up bumping the total zoom on the front page down to 60% to make the pics a reasonable size. The headlines are tiny, but at least the whole effect isn’t gargantuan that way. I’m guessing you don’t want to code a text link and a pic link separately, and I get that it’s neater and more foolproof for traffic to have the whole area be a clickthrough. But it’s pretty frustrating from a usability standpoint that to have legible text on the front page also clutters everything with hyooge pics I can’t get rid of.
Hi! I was just trawling through some old posts, and saw your comment. I’m not sure how you usually edit/resize images, but here’s a little bit of info that might possibly be helpful:
– The images and text that appear in teasers on the homepage are separate elements.
– They are, however, overlaid with a big link, which is meant to make the teasers easier to access on touch.
I’m not sure if your scripts/extensions understand CSS selectors (Adblock does, for example), but if you hide `.teaser .link-cap` (without the quotes), that *should* fix the issue you’re having. Alternately, if you want to resize the image, `.teaser-feed .teaser .thumb` (again, without the quotes) is the selector you’d want.
If the preceding paragraph was complete nonsense, please disregard it—and with my apologies! Drop us a line at the email address listed above, and I’ll see if I can help you out further.
Thanks!
Nice work.